Riot Games revealed in this forum thread that its MOBA game League of Legends had recently been the victim of a DDoS attack at the hands of a handful of very naughty players. The company said that a recent hotfix has taken care of some of the trouble and has kept the game from dying, though the company admitted that players in a targeted game session will still experience some lag and possible disconnection. Still, the game will reconnect and pick up where it left off if that happens, they say.

We have served a fair share of negative news about Guild Wars 2, so we are always eager to mention something good about the game (which by most accounts is a pretty awesome game experience - bannings and hacking schemes aside) when it happens. The good news is that a beta of the popular online RPG is coming to Mac OS X today. The Guild Wars 2 beta will be connected to the game's main live servers, which will allow Mac and Windows computers to play together, according to publisher NCSoft. Also the Mac Beta is free to anyone who bought the PC version of the game.

While the high levels of cheating in Battlefield 3 might have been curtailed to some degree since its launch on various platforms, it's still a problem and the "report" button on the game's Battlelog is a button push that leads to nowhere. Well apparently EA Dice has finally decided to fix the problem, if you believe this brief report on fan site BF3 Blog (for the record, I do).

This shouldn't come as too much of a shock to anyone: Guild Wars 2 has managed to sell two million copies in its first two weeks of availability. The numbers come from publisher NCsoft who also said that the game has hit the peak concurrent user milestone of 400,000 users at one time.

RuneScape makers Jagex continues to shore up its executive team with high profile hires. The latest is Rob Ollett, the former Managing Director of Bigpoint. Ollett will lead the charge in Jagex's push beyond RuneScape into third-party publishing via a new publishing platform.

Episode 18 of the Super Podcast Action Committee sees host Andrew Eisen team up with GP Managing Editor James Fudge, who sat in for E.

In a recent interview with Develop, Wargaming CEO Victor Kislyi said that most game publishers just don't understand how to create a successful free-to-play game. He also points out that most of those traditional publishers dipping their toes into the market have no idea how the free-to-play business model works.

Following up on a story from earlier this week about Gotham City Imposters going free-to-play, we can now confirm that it was more than just a rumor. This morning Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment officially announced that the online multiplayer action game is now available for free through Steam.

Showing its continued resolve against those who are not following the rules, ArenaNet has permanently banned around 3,000 accounts for using an exploit in its recently released online role-playing game, Guild Wars 2. The exploit in question involves an in-game vendor that "incorrectly" sells items at incredibly low prices.

ArenaNet has inked a deal with KongZhong Corporation to bring its popular and recently launched online RPG Guild Wars 2 to mainland China. The partnership is also apparently one of the biggest licensing transactions for a Western game in the Chinese marketplace. Under the terms of the licensing deal, ArenaNet has the option to buy up to 40 million of KongZhong Corporation's ordinary shares after the commercial launch of Guild Wars 2 in the region.

In the first few days after launch, Guild Wars 2 developer ArenaNet has had to ban a number of accounts for not following the rules related to offensive game names. That policy is laid out here in the "Guild Wars 2 Naming Policy" document, but some users apparently didn't get the memo and found themselves banned.

Is Gotham City Imposters going free-to-play? According to data on the Open Steamworks Content Description Record Database (by way of NeoGAF), signs point to "yes." The Open Steamworks Content Description Record Database is an unofficial record of games and their descriptions provided by Valve.

Guild Wars 2 is finding early success thanks to customers willing to pre-order the game in exchange for early access. ArenaNet's multiplayer-focused online RPG saw 1 million pre-orders, according to C&VG. On top of that, during the "headstart phase" the Guild Wars 2 servers saw a peak of 400,000 concurrent users, according to publisher NCSoft.

Major League Gaming announced that it is withholding the prizes and titles for the top two League of Legends teams that played at this weekend’s MLG Summer Championships. The pro gaming league said in a statement that the two teams engaged in acts of "collusion."

"MLG regrets to announce that we will not be awarding 1st or 2nd Place finishes for the Summer Championship League of Legends Event," the company said in a statement. "We have determined that there was collusion between the two final teams, Curse NA and Team Dignitas."

Nexon announced today that its North American subsidiary, Nexon America, will have a new CEO. The free-to-play company best known for Maple Story will be replacing CEO Daniel Kim with Min Kim. Min Kim will take over September 1, while Daniel Kim will return to the company's headquarters in Seoul to take on a new role. Min Kim is no stranger to North America - he helped oversee the establishment of Nexon America in 2005, and helped launch the role-playing game MapleStory here.

From time to time we like to give EA "the business" about its policy on used games, online passes, the way it handles DRM, etc., but sometimes they do good things for consumers. For example, today DICE announced that it has increased the number of official Battlefield 3 servers for console systems. This is in response to complaints from some fans about having to use servers run by other gamers who are not always the most cordial hosts... From Dice:

The Mercury News offers a little background on why executives at the cloud-based gaming subscription service OnLive decided to pull the trigger last Friday. The company fired staff and decided to go with an "assignment for the benefit of creditors" (commonly referred to as ABC). The paper claims that the company owed $30 - $40 million dollars to various creditors and had little money to pay them anything.

MMO maker Funcom is laying off some of its staff around the globe as part of previously announced "cost-adjustment initiatives." A Funcom representative confirmed ongoing layoffs in a statement to Polygon, but would not say just how many people might be out of work after the process is complete.

League of Legends maker Riot Games has managed to wrestle a web domain from a porn company. The URL, LeagueofLegends.co, relied heavily on user error to lure unsuspecting surfers to its dark and saucy doors where they were served up all kinds of nakedness... Riot Games won its legal dispute against the owner of LeagueofLegends.co, a domain that redirected users looking for the official site of multiplayer online battle arena League of Legends to a porn site.

I wonder how the citizens of Rhode Island feel about free-to-play games... Ultimately their opinion is of paramount importance now that the state owns the rights to Curt Schilling's first MMO project, Copernicus. So what does free-to-play have to do with it? Well, apparently the plan for 38 Studios' first MMO was to launch it as a free-to-play game, according to Boston Magazine. At least that is what Schilling told the publication...

Public documents unearthed by the Wall Street Journal reveal that social games maker and publisher Zynga spent right around $75,000 in lobbying fees to get its point across to lawmakers in Washington D.C. and Sacramento. So what is on the company's agenda? It wants online gambling legalized so that it can start offering players of its online social games real-world cash.

Former Empire: Total War designer Jan van der Crabben offered a dire prediction for companies thinking of swimming in the free-to-play pond: expect a 70 percent drop in initial registered users.

En Masse Entertainment has settled a lawsuit with NCsoft over its massively multiplayer game Tera. The company best known for Lineage and City of Heroes sued the publisher of the game over claims that former NCsoft employees (who were developing the game under a new studio called Bluehole) had swiped assets from Lineage III and used them in the creation of Tera. Apparently the two companies have come to some sort of amicable agreement.

Details of the settlement were not disclosed.

Blizzard Entertainment president and co-founder Mike Morhaime issued a statement late last night revealing that Battle.net had been infiltrated by unknown sources and that some user data may have been compromised. Though his note to the community downplayed the security breach, Morhaime acknowledged that a list of email addresses for global Battle.net users outside of China, cryptographically scrambled versions of Battle.net passwords, answers to personal security questions, and information related to Mobile and Dial-In Authenticators were illegally accessed.

Apparently the troubles are behind Sulake's Habbo Hotel, because the popular virtual hangout for teens is opening up to teens in Turkey. The new destination for Turkish teens is located at www.habbo.com.tr. The site, like every other region supported by Habbo Hotel, is free to play.

Rajan Zed, President of the Universal Society of Hinduism, has issued another statement against Hi-Rez Studios' upcoming massively online battle arena (MOBA) game, SMITE. This time the group is asking the organizers of QuakeCon (which starts this Thursday in the great state of Texas) to remove the game from its competition line-up. From the statement, as reported by Kotaku:

While details are still a bit sketchy, an Oakley, California teen has been arrested for attempted murder after an altercation while playing a video game online turned to real-world violence. The incident occurred on Monday afternoon after two friends - an unnamed twenty-year-old man and a seventeen-year-old boy got into an altercation. According to Jimmy Lee from the Costa County Sheriff's Department, the two men were playing an unnamed video game online, which led to an argument about something.

While some in the Linux community have lauded the idea of Steam coming to the popular open-source operating system, some like Richard Stallman think it is not a good idea. Richard Stallman is better known as the founder of the Free Software Foundation and the GNU operating system. He has said publicly that charging users for DRM-protected games on an open-source platform is "unethical".

If you live in Nashville, Tennessee then you probably use Comcast for most of your internet needs, but a new trial in the region that begins tomorrow will change the way you use your internet connection for gaming and entertainment. Starting Wednesday, August 1, Comcast will test a new usage-based broadband policy on its Nashville customers. The company will data cap its customers at 300 GB a month and anyone that goes over that threshold will be charged an additional $10 per 50 GB of additional data used.

Nominees for the 2012 Game Developers Choice Online Awards have been announced, with Star Wars: The Old Republic picking up the most in six different categories. Other games picking up multiple nominations this year include League of Legends, World of Warcraft, Rage Of Bahamut, Empires & Allies, Realm of the Mad God, Rift, CastleVille, The Sims Social, and Draw Something.